


September Girls

by mingbee



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 19:42:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5883127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mingbee/pseuds/mingbee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jordan and Daisy in September, year by year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	September Girls

It’s September. Daisy’s riding on your handlebars, the white edges of her dress blooming, fluttering over the tops of your thighs. Warmer than skin. Her head is tilted back toward the sun and you can imagine what her mouth looks like, parted enough for the wind to kiss. You can imagine her bare throat and the shadow of a pendant nestled in that sweet hollow. You can remember that you won that pendant from Joey Wilkerson and his jutting little 3-wood, how he’d bet all his mother’s best rubies on a golf match: 10 holes. How he held you down in the sand that day after you won by 50 points: by the wrists, his mouth approaching yours, a kiss like a fist to the mouth. How he’d lifted up your skirt to see what was there. So you’re not a boy, he’d said. And his mouth, so large it blacked the sun. You could remember all of it if you wanted to. You could even imagine Daisy singing, the way she did when she didn’t even know it. Some lilting lullaby you were convinced you’d only heard in a dream.

But she isn’t singing, and the day is clotting into night, and you’re pumping your legs. The bicycle groans. Your father built it, and he’d be horrified to know anyone was perched so carelessly, legs tittering in the air, on the polished bars. But your father is long gone, and besides, Daisy is the smallest girl in your class. You’re going uphill now, sundown smearing everything the color of strawberry ice cream. Daisy would like that comparison. Daisy always seemed to disappear at sundown, her hair blurry, the freckles on her back wavering, as if they can’t decide where to touch down.

You stare. You can’t help it. The hair at the nape of her neck is almost translucent. You imagine what how they’d react to touch. Would they wilt? Or would they stand electrified? Your father was the one who told you what electricity was. He’d brought home so many diagrams home from work, his cufflinks brassy and fat, winking light across the text: ELECTRICITY IS THE FUTURE. There was a cartoon of the future printed under the headline. In color, a man squatting in some kind of hovering box, a house made of pure glass, streets that floated above oceans. Under the water, cities unraveling for miles. And above it all a generator throwing sparks into the air.

THIS IS THE FUTURE CALLING, said the cartoon, and there was a woman cradling a phone to her smudged ear. But the phone was cordless, afloat.

She’s speaking to no one, you’d told daddy, dismayed. And he’d smiled. And he’d folded the advertisement, told you to go to bed.

You turn a corner, pass a sleek black car with three boys. They whistle to Daisy and she waves her right hand, giggles. But you see her left hand clench the bars, whiten.

“Jordan,” she whispers, and here you are.

Your father used to read you scary stories on the nights he didn’t drink. The nights his shirtsleeves were rolled up and the smile he wore was toothless, kind. And in every story there was a house like Daisy’s: against the sky it is all shadow, roof turned turret, windows like gaping mouths. The kind of house that breathes around you. Not so much haunting you as begging for you to haunt it.

“Jordy,” she says, as you slow. This is fatal, and you know it. You remember how Mrs. Howard told everyone in elementary school to draw their futures: husbands, wives, houses, children. A lawn and a house with two stories. But you’d drawn a cordless phone, a road in the sky. A girl disappearing at the end of it. Jordan, she’d said sternly. I can’t put this on the wall. But you refused to draw anything else, and in the end she tacked an empty page to the wall, right next to Daisy’s drawing of a man in a car, a girl in the wife seat with yellow hair and no eyes, because eyes are too hard to draw, she said.

THE FUTURE. Blank page. Yellow hair and no eyes.

“Everything looks like ice cream,” Daisy says, twisting toward you. Her cheekbones are windburned, pink. You smirk, but what you really want to say is soundless.

“Tomorrow, take me to the ocean,” she says to you, and you imagine her body afloat, her laugh as she stumbles out of the ocean, salt weeping down her arms. You stand on the shore, cool and silent, a twig pinched between your front teeth. She’ll nickname you a crow, she a mermaid. She won’t bother to dry herself before running up the porch, soaked and laughing and lurching through the doorway like the sister of a storm.

This is fatal, and you know it.

“I will,” you say. You do.

**Author's Note:**

> Omg I'm so bad at plot. What is plot. Anyway, thanks for reading!! Please stay tuned for more gay-af goodness ^_^


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